McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine, living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary, and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893 with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the "muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry, in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.

Stead, William Thomas (1849-1912). English journalist and newspaper editor. Born in a Congregational minister’s family in Northumberland, England, W. T. Stead felt a religious call to the ministry as a young man but turned at age twenty-two to reform-minded journalism, first at the Northern Echo in Darlington and then at the Pall Mall Gazette in London. S. S. McClure, who also published reform-minded and sometimes sensational pieces in McClure’s Magazine, was acquainted with Stead, and Cather may have met him when she was conducting McClure’s business in London. Stead died in the sinking of the Titanic.